It shocked me to learn that it has been six years since I last reviewed an edition of Paranoia; back in 2017 I did a System Split comparison between Paranoia Red Clearance Edition and Paranoia XP, two editions of the game which had significant mechanical departures from each other. At the time, my conclusion was that while Red Clearance Edition was a better game, XP was the better Paranoia. Apparently someone over at Mongoose read my review, because the new edition of Paranoia (called The Perfect Edition while on Kickstarter) takes my conclusions to an unsettling tee: the slicker rules are kept, the setting is rolled back to more reflect a throughline from the older editions, and the cards, which worked way better in theory than in practice, were removed. The result is remarkably close to a version using Red Clearance Edition rules with XP-style fluff, and (unsurprisingly) it turns out that yes, I really do like the version of the game made seemingly in direct response to my critiques. That all said, the new edition of Paranoia is still an edition of Paranoia made in 2023, and that alone has gotten me thinking about this. So let’s set aside the goofy clearance warnings, fake redactions, and admonishments to self-terminate, and talk about how Paranoia, any Paranoia, actually fits into the gaming landscape here in the roaring 2020s.

A brief attempt at a review

The new Paranoia uses the same basic mechanics as Red Clearance Edition with a few tweaks; there’s a conversion guide in the back but it isn’t long. This means there are still treason stars, moxie still replaces perversity, and this is still a dice pool system. Some of the more iffy systems like the adjectives are out, that specific element replaced with a simple system called buttons which I rather like. Each troubleshooter has a treason button and a violence button; they are simply conditions under which said troubleshooter will commit either treason or violence. Why are they called buttons? Because the GM gets to push them. Either the GM gets to push them or the players push them themselves to earn extra moxie, which is a nice touch.

One thing I appreciate, speaking of earning (or arbitrarily gifting) moxie, is that this version of the game has figured out GM caprice a bit better. Red Clearance Edition was really trying to get you as the GM to be a detached referee who happened to play Friend Computer and all the NPCs, and somehow be a normal, helpful, impartial GM at the same time. Even if this was (barely) possible it’s not ideal, and the game went a bit overboard in making the players distrust each other for mechanical reasons (like screwing each other over in character creation) in order to prevent the GM from having to do it. This edition walks that back a bit (character creation still involves some light backstabbing), understanding that ultimately the GM is responsible for portraying the capricious, untrustworthy, and frankly broken setting in which the players exist. This version, instead of trying to tell the GM ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ (in Paranoia? Really?) offers a more limited but honestly more helpful bit of advice about recognizing when a player is truly frustrated and upset as opposed to their character. Of course games are supposed to be fun, but some of the fun in Paranoia is in violation of expectations, and that requires both the GM and the players to lean into it. Paranoia is the right title for this game in part because of how it’s run, after all.

Over all, this is a good edition of Paranoia, and moves the needle in the right direction from Red Clearance Edition. I highly appreciate the expansion of the fluff from Red Clearance Edition back towards what it was in XP, though honestly this game could have used another 20 pages of arbitrary random tables like offices, vending machines, or barrel contents.

The red (clearance) meat of the issue

Here’s one notable change in this edition of Paranoia which says an awful lot about what Paranoia is as a game. In Red Clearance Edition, the primary enemy of note was changed from communists to terrorists. This was done, as I believe was explained during the Kickstarter, to bring the game up to date with modern satirical sensibilities. In Paranoia The Core Book, as a result of ‘The Great Hotfix’, communists have been reseated as “the #1 Most Hated Evil Group of Madmen”. If there’s one thing that indicates the future path for Paranoia, I believe this is it.

Paranoia is damn near 40 years old (yes, it was released in 1984, and yes, that is perfect, I agree). It is, strongly, a product of its time, and I’m not talking about the Cold War. 1984 predates Vampire:the Masquerade, it predates Cyberpunk. It predates the OGL and obviously PbtA and FitD. In 1984, virtually every RPG on the market and certainly everyone a typical consumer could actually get their hands on were party-based wargame derivatives. Hell, one of the few other games that really pushed that envelope at the time, Toon, shared a designer with Paranoia. Roleplaying games were not what they are now, and if you started in the hobby you almost certainly started with D&D. Okay, that last item is still probably true.

The point to be made here is that Paranoia, especially the first few editions, were a gutpunch of expectations violation that made the game one of the most memorable out there; nothing save maybe D&D itself has as strong a memetic imprint on the rest of the hobby as Paranoia. I’d also argue that it carried on that legacy at least through Paranoia XP and maybe even the 25th Anniversary Edition.

What happened after that was fragmentation. Starting in about 2010 and rapidly accelerating through to today, the design range of RPGs has increased dramatically; this range includes games which, in a non-satirical way, move either into the wheelhouse of Paranoia or completely out of target identification range of its tropes. How does Paranoia map onto a GMless or solo game? If you just played a campaign of The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power, is PC-PC betrayal a violated expectation? Is it funny? It gets more stark when you look at a game like Deathmatch Island, which (in admittedly a very different way) mechanizes the dichotomy between PC-PC competition and mistrust and PC-GM mistrust, does so completely straight and completely seriously, and takes place in a classic dystopia to boot.

Paranoia still could fill an important market niche today, but it’s vitally important to understand what that is, and why Paranoia could fill it. The market niche that Paranoia serves is, quite simply, taking the piss out of 5e players (and Pathfinder players too, lest they think themselves too good for this (we’re not – Ed.)). The dungeon games are still an overwhelming monopoly, and there’s a massive market of people who think that all roleplaying is D&D. The reason that Paranoia can and will always work for this is because Paranoia’s most effective satire was always directed at other roleplaying games. The dystopian setting of Paranoia is well-implemented and punchy, but it’s not really satirizing dystopias; it’s using the internally inconsistent nature of such a dystopia as a playground in which to satirize RPGs. Due to its age, though, satirizing RPGs mostly means satirizing D&D. That’s why it doesn’t really matter if the in-game enemy is communists, and why keeping it consistent to the older editions is likely a better idea than trying to make the setting satire seem like more than it actually is. Similarly, the rules simply need to not be an obstacle to play in order for Paranoia to work; what the game actually needs is the vibe and the right GM-facing procedures to get home tables creating the right air of, well, paranoia.

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The new edition of Paranoia (the Perfect Edition, whatever you want to call it) works well; the rules cleanup is kept and largely not messed with, but the game regains a bit of its self-awareness and edge that was kind of rubbed off of Red Clearance Edition by, honestly, a bit too much game design. But just like how Paranoia has always relied on its concept and procedures more than rules, this new Paranoia needs to rely on something else entirely to see continued relevance.

Releasing a new version of Paranoia to 2500 nostalgic Kickstarter backers and then putting it on sale for that next trickle of nostalgia buyers is, frankly, depressing. If you want to prove that Paranoia needed a new edition in the first place, you need to do a better job shooting it into the mouths of core dragon game players who will actually see the edge to the satire. How do you put this game in front of people who aren’t already buying indie games, aren’t already seeing what RPGs can do, haven’t already heard of Paranoia? To be fair I could say the same thing about pretty much every nostalgia reboot, and the only one which has had an answer is Cyberpunk Red, which has new fans thanks to tie-ins which both enhanced the overall setting of the game and made headlines of their own. I can’t say Mongoose hasn’t tried, though the video game Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is best described merely as a disaster. It’s a shame, really. If there’s one game that deserved better than the ‘Kickstarter Thud’, Paranoia is it.

So yeah, I like the new edition of Paranoia. Thanks to the changes, I feel listened to. I’m probably not going to play it. Paranoia is Paranoia is Paranoia, and after running short games of it since 2008, I don’t feel like the same satire will give me anything new to explore, even with better rules. I’m old, though; when I was the average age of a gamer (12-15 years ago), I was playing the hell out of Paranoia because it still was telling me things I hadn’t heard about the other games I was playing. I guess it’s good that, six years after the first new Paranoia was funded through Kickstarter, another new Paranoia was funded through Kickstarter. But of all the 1980s games to get a reboot on Kickstarter (let alone two), Paranoia has by far the most wasted potential, the most ability to be more than it actually is. Paranoia still can be highly effective RPG satire…when viewed by those who are currently only playing mainstream RPGs. In today’s market, I’m not sure there’s a good answer on how to resolve that.

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